[sullyj3]

I'm running home-manager on arch and it's fantastic. I'm only using it for cli/tui programs, as I've had trouble getting gui software to correctly create desktop entries which show up in my menus. You can use it alongside pacman just fine.

[chriswarbo]

These options got GUI icons to appear for me (on Manjaro, an Arch derivative):

  targets.genericLinux.enable = true;
  xdg.mime.enable = true;
  xdg.systemDirs.data =
    [ "${config.home.homeDirectory}/.nix-profile/share/applications" ];

[kaba0]

In the worst case scenario, you can just manually create files in your home directory if needed, so putting them under .local/share something should get you desktop entries (though depending on the desktop/window manager you may need a restart).

[sullyj3]

Yeah, I'd much rather just install with pacman than manage them manually though.